One good way to get in the community, to attract future employers or to get a promotion is to improve our online presence. It is generally true in every field, but today let’s look into the booming software industry with a slight emphasis on job hunting.
First and foremost I need to state that I don’t want to look overly confident, or big headed. I share my modest story and experience so far.
Some proof: so far I received 3 inquiring emails from 3 of the biggest companies in tech: Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Claiming that I have a good profile and let’s have a pleasant chat about new job opportunities. No one specified what profile they meant exactly so I can only assume that the overall picture was convincing. By the way if anyone is reading this from Google, Spotify, Twitter…:D
So how did they spot me? Well, the good news: it is not rocket science, but it can take time.
Frequent and small improvements
I cannot emphasise it enough but a real powerful “secret” is taking small but frequent steps. Like learning a new language: if you learn 5 new words every day and do some review, imagine the outcome after a year. The same applies here. During the time of my first job I spent 1-2 hours after work almost every day to follow tutorials and screencasts. One can argue that one hour is good for nothing. Which is true if you do it once, but if you do it every day… Actually it is a good compromise, because in my case this way I had enough time for hobbies and to have a social life while in half a year I learned a lot.
Visibility
Another important aspect is visibility. No matter how rock we are if no one can see it. It is better to show the world that indeed we do outstanding work. An easy platform for this is GitHub. You can upload all the coding work, all the side projects you do. Even if you are only following tutorials at the beginning, I would recommend to put them into a repo and make a commit after every episode or article and just push it to the limit (to GitHub).
Community
The previously mentioned GitHub is also a good place to find interesting projects where you can do some improvements by sending a so called Pull Request.
Another forum to show some initiative is Stack Overflow. Under my second job in Malta, I went to coffee shops in numerous weekends to help the community by answer questions and giving tips. Still managing to have time to go to the beach or to rock climbing (fabulous time). My goal was to have an accepted question every week. Sometimes I had more sometimes less. In a few months at the beginning of the year with a not astronomical effort I was in the top 2-3% of that year. Which I never would have expected. Of course my friend told me why only top 2%, when top 1% is there…
Blogging
I’ve just started with writing blog posts and I’m still discover its mysteries. But there is no doubt that this is an another useful tool to facilitate becoming a well known celebrity.
Closing thoughts
From finding a new job project perspective all of the above show dedication to the software industry, which comes handy when sending away applications. On the other hand the mentioned points helped me to improve my skills a lot and in a rather fast way. They also helped me to become finally and officially a senior software engineer with a good job in abroad just in 4 years after the university.
Please let me know your opinion in the section below.
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